OSHW Logo Announced

The results are in and the new Open Hardware logo has been selected! After tallying nearly 9,000 votes it has been decided that “Golden Orb” by Macklin Chaffe will now represent the OSHW definition v1.0.

Rest assured that despite earlier controversy regarding a few users that had submitted a very large number of duplicate votes (over 3,100 in all), the results have been cleaned up and validated prior to announcing the winner.

If you agree with the definition you can now go ahead and use the logo on your creations! Some creative individuals at this Open Hardware Summit forum have made it easy for you with logos of varying sizes, colors, and fill – perfect for application on any background. Here you will also find vector-based versions and even an Eagle parts library for inclusion on your next board’s silkscreen!

[Jason] at MrDecals.com has also generously offered 3 free decals of the new logo to anyone who asks – just pay for shipping. Please note that this is not a paid advertisement, [Jason] received permission from opensourcehardware.org to run the promotion and $1 for US shipping seems very reasonable. We are guessing from the responses to previous giveaways that many HackaDay readers might be interested!

We personally love the way that the new logo keeps with the feel of the Open Source Intiative logo and can’t wait to see what hardware it starts showing up on!

@wardy:
Yes, but the gear –representing a circle– is open on the bottom. The keyhole is also open, suggesting a weak lock. That’s my take, anyway.

@dax:
The straight sides of the gear teeth will be much easier to print, especially at small scales that would be on a PCB. Anything but simple geometry in a small logo is just asking for it to be screwed up in print.

Not sure yet if I’ll use it; I didn’t vote for it. I liked the angled gear and the one with three loose screws. They were both part of the same submission, which I thought was kinda weird, actually; which one of the six or so was I voting on? I kinda liked ’em all, anyway *shrug*

And just for the record I did actually order some free stickers (despite my semantic reservations), because free stuff rules and psychology aside, it’s a pretty cool looking logo. I’ll stick it on my rover when it’s finished. :)

I might use it, might not. Cool logo though. I might have liked to have seen a few others than what was offered, but this is easy to silkscreen onto pretty much anything, including a PCB. Not that I would silkscreen it on a PCB, the sprocket is far too steampunk. Must have bare copper!

Last time I checked, the copyleft chip was on top by a large margin and I liked it that way. This design (the OSI-gear) I really don’t like at all.

I have to doubt the validity of this poll. Yes, someone _supposedly_ bot-spammed it. If that didn’t wasn’t bad enough, they went back and tried to “fix” things.
I don’t know if they actually wanted to influence the results themselves or if they are even capable of discerning between real votes and fake ones. There’s too many different way the results could have been skewed. The bottom line is I don’t think it really reflects people’s opinions at this point.

My initial choice, until I realized it looked like a broken gear. In the end as long as the term open hardware is included with the graphic does it really matter what the graphic looks like to anyone? As time passes any graphic standing alone will be sufficient for anyone working with open hardware. The rest of the world will be what the hell does that mean? No matter what graphic was chosen.

I went for my wallet to get a CC to order the free logos, but they use PayPal. Only using PayPal once I can’t remember my password. Got that straighten out, and an order placed. When I want decals of any kind of commercial quality mrdecals will be the fist source I’ll check, they deserve that much, but they’ll never get rich off me. I wish they could, cuz that would mean I’m not doing too bad myself :)

So I’m honestly not trying to troll here, but I’m a little confused about this whole official OSHW scene. If you’ve made the source available, it’s open source … what does a special symbol on your board add to the equation?

I’m obviously missing something, because it’s all very popular and has a lot of momentum. Can somebody explain it for me? Is it for particular legal situations where you want to sell the product, or what?

The symbol is the open hardware people’s attempt at branding boards in the same way that the FCC/UL/CE symbols are used to denote specific information. The special symbol adds many things to the board, leveraging synergy, for example ;-)

It’s been adopted because it’s popular, and it’s popular because the 20 or so self-declared “heads” of the maker movement decided it was a must-have. And, well, when those people, who have the ear of the whole movement, declare something, it’s getting followed regardless of merit…

It looks like the Open Source Hardware Definition 1.0 isn’t a license itself but sets requirements for other licenses. Is there a list of compatible licenses somewhere? It looks like Attribution-ShareAlike would be compatible, but an officially approved list would be nice so that I could be sure.

I see the open source community still hasn’t learned how to apply proper hinting or kerning to a typeface (GIMP is just as good as photoshop mentality prevents fixes from ever occuring), but at least the rest of the logo is bad / generic enough that most people won’t notice.